Chrissy Renae

Well now that the rant is over with, I can proceed to tell you a little about my actual week. Since you were patient with the novel style entry last time, I will be kind and entertain your eyes with mostly pictures.

Monday

English Cafe with other local teachers

Tuesday

New cell phone fiasco, followed by my HAIR CLEANING. I went back to the hair place and they deep conditioned my hair for free. Basically they played with my hair and put in a bunch of weird cremes and told me I was beautiful a  hundred times. Can’t complain about any of those things.

Wednesday

Woke up to THIS, which reminded me to appreciate the good things and stop stressing about the complications

Also, my first date with a legit Korean. It was really fun. That’s all I’m saying about it on a public forum such as a blog.

Thursday

COSTCO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s always one of my favorite places, but in Korea it just gets better. There are just some things I should just never have to go without (i.e. Fiber One bars, Kashi cereal, real cheese). Between the four of us (Jono, Freddy, Beenish, me) we spent almost $400 just on food. The reason I’m telling you that is so that you can try to imagine 4 foreigners carrying $400 worth of groceries through the streets of Seoul and then through a maze of a subway trek, and then trying to separate it all to our respective homes. Yeah, just imagine it. Didn’t cause a scene at all.

Friday

CHRISTMAS PARTY!!!!

Saturday

Sick morning (maybe I have the swine?? j/k. i’m fine.) Threw up off my balcony (embarassing). Slept most of the day.

Luckily I was better for the evening so I could hold up my plans with WOO-GIN. But first let me give you a brief recap on the story of the boy we like to call BEAUTIFUL KOREAN.

So one day Beenish and I were on the subway headed to a friend’s house, and we realized we were both staring at the same beautiful man sitting across from us.

Normally I am not so forward, but he was beautiful. I couldn’t help myself. Sooo I was like… uhhh can you speak english? AND HE CAN. And so we chatted and exchanged numbers and have been texting and finally got to hang out last night. I’m not like IN LOVE with the kid, because I think it’s weird to try to like someone you can barely communicate with. However, he sure is a pleasure for the eyes. He brought a friend too, so Beenish and I got to enjoy  a true Korean night on the town– kim bop, BBQ, norebong, and all.

Today

Christmas shopping in Uijeongbu. YAYYYY.

Ok that recap was exhausting, and it probably was for you too, so I’m never going to get that far behind again. Fin.

The bad news is that I’ve been really busy so haven’t updated in 6 days (how are you surviving??) but the good news is that I have internet in my house now!!! So it’s Sunday afternoon, and here I am sitting on my bedroom floor updating my blog. Dream come true.

From the beginning of this Korea decision, it seems like I’ve done evvverything the hard way. Most people got their placements within a matter of about two months and had relatively no hangups in getting here. My process took well over 6 months. It was all definitely a test of my patience, but I’m really glad it all worked out like it did, and I just kind of assumed it would all run smoothly once I got here. Except hellooooo it is ME and I can’t just do anything the easy way.

Last Saturday my cell phone (my beautiful, high tech, full of awesome gadgets cell phone) was stolen from a club in Hongdae. It was my fault for being so careless with it, but I was still frustrated that it just disappeared so quickly. On Tuesday Sophia took me back to the phone place to get a new one, and the whole experience was beyond frustrating. Clearly I can’t speak any Korean, so the guy was explaining everything to Sophia and gave me all these different options and different cost scenarios and then she would try to translate it to me and it was all just making NO sense and I was tired and I felt like my head was going to explode. It was by far the worst experience I’ve had since I got here. I was mad at myself for losing the phone, mad at the cell company for making it sooo complicated to replace a phone (do people just never lose their phones here? i don’t get it), and mad at the weather for being so freaking cold.

Luckily we got it all worked out and by the time I got home I was feeling much better… but of course the complications couldn’t stop there. Once we left they called and said there was a problem with my bank account so my phone couldn’t be activated yet. Soooo Wednesday I went to the bank to fix my account (they needed to add my alien registration card id number to the account so it would match the cell phone… or something. who knows. being a foreigner sucks.) and I did it all by myself! Sophia didn’t even come, yet I was able to find a clerk who spoke English and got me all set.

Friday the internet guy was scheduled to come in the afternoon, so I left school early and stopped by the atm on the way home to pull out the cash deposit I had to pay (another reason being a foreigner sucks). Buttttt of course– my atm card wouldn’t work. So I jumped into a taxi and raced across town backkk to the bank, and they had to reissue me a whole new atm card. AWESOME.

So the point of all of this whining and blabbing is to demonstrate that my tally now looks like this:

• 2nd month
• 3rd cell phone
• 2nd bank account
• 2nd atm card
• almost 2nd camera cuz i lost it for a day, but then found it in my friend’s fridge. weird…

Nope, can’t do ANYTHING the easy way. I’m hoping that this concludes the annoying “getting settled” part of moving to a foreign country, and that now I can just proceed as a normal person.

Honestly everything else about living here has been amazing and flawless and I love lovvvve it, but maybe I just needed this week to shake things up a little and remind me not to take the good days for granted. Because this could be an awful experience, I could be homesick, I could have no friends, I could have a bad school and bad students, I could question my decision to come here. All of those things would be muchhh worse than having to get a 2nd phone and 2nd bank account, but none of them are problems at all! So despite the fact that this week has been super frustrating and stressful, I’ve never once questioned my decision to be here, and to me- that feeling of content is priceless!